Creative Thinking from Boredom #2

I am loving the fact that there are increasing appeals to embrace boredom. I blogged on this topic a little while back, extolling the central importance of building moments of peaceful reflection and boredom in to your day.  I rarely do manage to do so however.  I tend to prefer the option of switching off or zoning out of my busy day via distraction – reading, music or more recently playing Draw Something incessantly.  It is not the best way forward I concede. It is far better to switch off and let some of the busy thinking flow out and allow myself the chance to create some more positive ideas.

The interesting point that Martin Lindstrom adds in his blog is the effect that various technologies of distraction, but specifically computers, have on kids and how dramatically it reduces their creativity.  Which is true to a degree, but what he fails to then consider is how interactive gaming or other forms of computer based learning could be used to enhance their creativity.  It tends to be the reaction of most parents to view computers games as wholly a bad thing for young kids, but I think that there are benefits to exposing kids to interactive computing/gaming at an early age. I have for example found that my Wii playing son is more Technologically astute in general than my Daughter (who has very little interest in the Wii) – the familiarity of interacting with a screen via a controller seems to have made him more instinctively comfortable with a computer keyboard and mouse too.  He also learnt to read basic instructions from a screen at a very young age.  So much of my kids school based learning is IT based, including their homework from the age of 4.5 years old!  So computer skills need to be encouraged whether we like it or not – the fact that they will need well developed IT skills later in life goes without saying.   The challenge is how to force boredom and creative play on to our kids when they have so many competing pressures and or requirements.  I guess the best we can do as parents is provide as many and varied platforms as possible and allow times that are open and unstructured too.

One answer I believe lays with the Raspberry Pi – a chance to move our kids away from software and interaction to manipulation and development which requires far more creative thinking.  I have heard the difference being described as knowing how to drive a car compared to being able to repair a car.  The level of understanding required is entirely different.  But a full exploration of Pi requires more blogging another time.